Capitalism and desire: the psychological cost of free markets, by Todd McGowan

Can we analyze capitalism psychologically? Perhaps if this question was posed to Freud himself, he would have expressed his doubts about finding an answer; because he wondered at the end of his book, which he titled "Civilization and Its Discontents," whether it was possible for a person to conduct a psychological analysis of society as a whole, and he concluded that he could not do so. The problem, according to his view, is not a practical dilemma; but although one cannot subject an entire society or an entire economic system to a series of psychoanalytic sessions, every social system and every economic system expresses itself through joints that betray its psychological echoes. And if we accept the judgment that we cannot perform psychoanalysis of capitalism as a social-economic system; then we will implicitly agree with the arguments adopted by the defenders of capitalism; where the proponents of this system claim that capitalism is a function of human nature, and that there is an ideal overlap between capitalism and human nature. Therefore, there is no place through which one can criticize it.